In the months before he was accused of speeding through a Fort Story gate and slamming into a police cruiser, killing the sailor inside, Nathaniel Lee Campbell lost his factory job and his father died.
It remains unclear why Campbell, 39, made the four-hour journey to Virginia Beach from Shenandoah — a Page County hamlet wedged between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Massanutten Ridge — but it ended inside Fort Story’s Gate 8.
Court documents allege the Chevrolet pickup he drove the wrong direction through an exit reached 81 miles per hour before colliding head on with Master-at-Arms 3rd Class Oscar Temores.
Temores, 23, died at a hospital. His brother, Ricky, said the family is taking his death “one step at a time.”
A memorial service for Temores is scheduled for Thursday at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek’s Gator Theater. It is not open to the public.
The Nov. 30 incident and the resulting involuntary homicide charge against Campbell follows a string of domestic violence-related charges and tangles with law enforcement that Campbell has faced during the last decade, according to interviews and police records.
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Campbell was one of three workers laid off in May by Shenandoah manufacturer KVK Precision Specialties, Inc., the company’s President and CEO Jeff Vaughan told Navy Times in a phone interview.
“He was the least senior guy,” Vaughan said.
Campbell’s father, Ricky, died in March and his son’s work performance had “slipped,” Vaughan said.
Campbell didn’t show up for work several times over the course of the month or so before he was laid off, but Vaughan said the absences didn’t factor into his dismissal.
He described Campbell as “just an average guy” who had done a “good” job at the factory.
When he was arrested in the wake of the Fort Story collision, Campbell said he’d been unemployed since March and claimed an inheritance as his only source of income, according to court records.
Vaughan said KVK’s records showed that Campbell had worked there since June 2017, his second stint at the factory.
He joined the company in June 1999 and was among 15 who were let go in early 2011 as part of a staff reduction, Vaughan said.
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Before his return to KVK, Campbell was convicted of misdemeanor assault and battery of a family member and a felony charge of strangling another causing injury stemming from a 2015 incident in which he choked his father.
According to a Page County Sheriff’s Office incident report, Ricky Campbell and his wife Debra went to a home they inherited in Shenandoah to talk with their son about moving out.
Campbell been living in the residence previously owned by his grandmother for three years while working only intermittently, and his parents gave him money for food and utilities.
They’d been trying to “coax” him out for a while — the cost of maintaining that home and their own was increasingly difficult on their retirement incomes — but when Campbell’s parents tried to talk with him about the situation, their son turned hostile, the report said.
On April 12, 2015, Campbell attacked his father, pinning him against a wall and choking him until the elder man thought he might black out.
Four days later, his parents went to the sheriff’s office to file a complaint. Bruises on his father’s arms and chest from the attack were still visible, according to the incident report.
The parents said that Campbell told them if he was forced to move he’d “burn it and their house to the ground,” the investigator wrote.
Throughout the Campbells’ interview “it was obvious that they were frightened by their son and past dealings with him,” according to the report.
Debra Campbell declined to talk with the Navy Times.
Her son received a five-year suspended sentence on the felony charge and a 90-day sentence with 29 days suspended on the misdemeanor charge, according to online court records.
A charge tied to his threat to burn their houses was dropped.
Campbell also received four years of supervised probation.
He was arrested again on Dec. 29, 2015 and charged with public swearing and intoxication in Harrisonburg/Rockland County General District Court.
It’s unclear from online court records if that triggered more charges, but in early 2016 Campbell was arrested and charged in Page County Circuit Court for violating the terms of his probation.
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Campbell’s ex-wife, Sarah Osborne, told Navy Times in a phone interview that her ex-husband mistreated her throughout their marriage, which ended before the 2015 incident.
Part of her claim is documented in another Page County Sheriff’s Department report tied to a 2009 incident.
Osborne said Campbell phoned from his parents’ home the day after Christmas, wanting her to come over.
He’d been arguing with his father, she said. Osborne said she didn’t want to go but Campbell “wouldn’t stop."
When Osborne entered, she said she found her husband standing in the hallway with a rifle “screaming and yelling and pointing the gun at me."
He’d already fired one round through a bedroom wall, she said, but then raised the weapon and pointed it at her and pulled the trigger.
“It went off over my head," Osborne said. "I ran out of the house screaming hysterically. I didn’t know if I’d been hit or not.”
When Sheriff’s deputies pulled up around 5:30 p.m., they found Campbell along the edge of the road outside the home. He smelled of alcohol, the investigator wrote.
Campbell told them when his wife arrived he “spatted with her and he put the rifle to the floor to show aggression."
According to the report, Osborne told them Campbell’s rifle discharged over her head while he fumbled to catch it after it began to fall and that the couple weren’t arguing.
In her interview with Navy Times, Osborne disputed the agency’s version of events.
“I wouldn’t call the police for a gun being fired over my head, screaming hysterically on a 911 call, if we weren’t arguing and that gun wasn’t aimed at my chest and head,” she said.
Campbell was later found guilty on a charge of misdemeanor reckless handling of a firearm. He received a 60-day suspended sentence and a year of unsupervised probation.
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Osbourne said that leaving her relationship with Campbell became a plot to escape. One day, she waited until he left for work.
“As soon as he pulled out of the driveway, I grabbed my kids, got in my brother’s car and came home,” she said.
She has full custody of the couple’s two children and Campbell has not seen them in five years, she added.
Osborne said she has not spoken to Campbell in about three years, and their last conversation wasn’t much of a talk.
He called her from a phone number she did not recognize and when Osborne she realized who it was she told him never to call again, she said.
Osborne told Navy Times that she was not aware that Campbell had been involved in the Fort Story incident until contacted by a reporter.
“There shouldn’t be someone innocent lying in the ground," Osborne said.
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Campbell’s next hearing is scheduled for Friday in Virginia Beach General District Court.
His court-appointed attorney did not return multiple phone messages about this story.
Cambpell also did not respond to two letters mailed by Navy Times to the Virginia Beach Correctional Center.
Macie Allen, a spokesperson for the Virginia Beach Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office said Campbell has not requested a bond hearing.
She also declined to comment on the case.
Courtney Mabeus-Brown is the senior reporter at Air Force Times. She is an award-winning journalist who previously covered the military for Navy Times and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where she first set foot on an aircraft carrier. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and more.
